As I occasionally dabble in day trading on the US stock exchange, I try to keep myself abreast of the latest financial news. Among others, I’ve been monitoring recent news on IT industry giant Sun Microsystems‘ struggles with the recession. Although this really shouldn’t come as a surprise as practically everyone has already been affected one way or the other by the current worldwide crisis. I still can’t help but be uneasy as I have close friends who work for the said multinational.

It was around early last month when rumors came out that Sun was up for sale. But it wasn’t until news that another IT titan, IBM Corp. was actually in talks to buy the troubled California-based company did the rumors got its dreaded confirmation. But news now have it that the deal eventually ended up with yet another industry giant Oracle Corp. The proposed acquisition reportedly is for a whopping $7.4 billion.

Oracle and Sun have always been complementary. A great number of Oracle’s installed base has been on Sun hardware and Sun’s Solaris operating system. The acquisition would now clearly result in overlap of product and technology, as the software side of Sun is very compatible with Oracle’s product offerings.

A specific case which could potentially lead to a mess would be Sun’s MySQL database. Database software is already Oracle’s main source of revenue. And under current arrangements, Sun currently provides the MySQL database as a free download, with customers paying Sun and/or its solution providers for support.

There are other areas where the two companies would end up having competing offerings. All of which could spell big trouble or great opportunity. Either way, this clearly means a “reorganization” would be in order. And in any such event, jobs are easily always in peril. I really hope this goes the positive way and eventually open up favorable possibilities not only for my friends and their colleagues; but as well for the thousands who have already lost their jobs due to the current economic calamity.

But at this point, I guess all anyone can do is wait and see.  

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Tags: database, ibm, mysql, oracle, sun microsystems, US stocks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 1:12 PM and is filed under Computers, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.